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Friday, April 25, 2014

Latest right-wing hero little more than a scofflaw—& now it turns out he’s also a racist

By Marc Jampole

How Cliven Bundy became a hero to the right-wing is beyond
me.

Bundy is the rancher who has refused to pay fees to graze
his cattle on public lands for more than 20 years. As the New York Times noted, 16,000 other
ranchers pay the fees, which are considered fairly cheap. But even the typical
corporate giveaway involving federal government assets isn’t good enough for
Bundy. Not only did he refuse to pay the nominal fees; when the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) rangers recently tried to confiscate 500 head of his cattle,
he organized 50 supporters, some armed with handguns and rifles, to chase off
them off. No one from the feds has come calling since then. Right-wing
commentators and elected officials, including Rand Paul, have praised Bundy and
his gumption to stand up to the evil federal government.

My question is why?

There is no doubt that Bundy has the appropriate atmospherics
to be a right-wing cause célèbre: He’s a gun-toting cowboy who is defying the
federal government and his views on abortion and minorities are in line with other
conservatives.

But strip away the theatre and you are left with a long-term
scofflaw with no redeeming case to make for himself.

He broke the law and right-wingers are supposed to support law
and order.

Part of the right-wing program has always been to replace
taxes on wealth and income with usage taxes. For decades conservatives have
mouthed pieties about closing loopholes as opposed to raising taxes. All the expression “closing loopholes” means
is to make people pay their fair share. Clearly, Bundy is not paying his fair
share of the fees that clearly substitute for taxes on others.

And let’s not forget about the issue of property.
Right-wingers place property above life itself.
Right-wingers want to remove constraints on private property such as
environmental and safety regulations. They uphold the right of someone to use a
firearm to injure others in defense of property every time some trigger happy
George Zimmerman or Michael Dunn kills a young black male.

Respect for the property of others and the cardinal
importance of property rights are foundations of right-wing political theory. And
yet they ignore the fact that Bundy is not respecting the property of others.
That the property belongs to all of us shouldn’t matter, except to those who
believe that the collective entry known as government should not hold
property. These folks should imagine
that the grazing lands were private. Bundy and the 16,000 other ranchers who
haven’t defied the government would all be paying grazing fees—likely much
higher than now—to an individual or a corporation. Right-wingers would clearly
not rise in defense of someone who was poaching on the private property of
another. In fact, the right wing would support the idea that the property
owners could shoot Bundy and his ranchers as soon as they trespassed onto the
land in question.

So how can the right-wing support him?

After the retreat of
the BLM rangers, Good ol’ boy Cliven (or is that Cloven?) must have been
feeling his oats, because in a Times interview, he came out against abortion
and made some very obnoxious comments about African-Americans. He said that he
remembers driving by a public-housing project in Las Vegas and seeing “at
least a half-dozen (black) people sitting on the porch, they didn’t have
nothing to do. Because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what
do they do? They abort their young
children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to
pick cotton….And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking
cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under
government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

As to be expected, the same Republican Senators who
supported Bundy are backing away now that he is expressing overt racism.

The Obama Administration has come away looking craven again,
just as it does in all its negotiations with Republicans over budget
issues. Once again Obama appears to be
capitulating to the right wing.

Instead of backing off, BLM should have notified the
Department of Justice and gotten some help and a lot of firepower. President
Obama should have made sure that the BLM returned to the site with hundreds of
armed agents, helicopters in the air and tanks. It should have given Bundy’s supporters
amply time to stand down and leave with their guns. Then they should have taken
the cattle by force.

There is no doubt that an assault on Bundy’s position would
create a lot of negative publicity for the President, especially in the very
unlikely event that someone were killed or injured; it’s far more likely that
faced with a superior force, the ragtag army Bundy put together would
dissipate. No matter, the right would excoriate Obama. Some would point out that the president is
more willing to take arms against his own countrymen than Russia—a scurrilous
and unpatriotic accusation since there is absolutely no support for putting
U.S. troops into Ukraine. There is no doubt that some votes would be lost in
the fall, especially since it’s likely the news media would jump on the
forcible taking of Bundy’s cattle as another reason why the Democrats can’t win
in November.

But I say, so what! The job of the President of the United
States is not to get reelected or to help his party‘s nominees get elected. The
president’s job is to uphold the laws of the United States. Giving into Bundy
will just embolden others who have no respect of the laws of the United States
to try similar stunts.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.